Read Ebook: The New Education A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) by Nearing Scott

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FOOTNOTES:

THE NEW BASIS FOR EDUCATION

I Can There Be a New Basis?

Can there be a new basis for education? Does the foundation upon which education rests really change? Is the educational system of one age necessarily unfitted to provide for the educational needs of the next? These, and a multitude of the similar questions which people interested in educational progress are asking themselves, arise out of the process of transition that is seemingly one of the fundamental propositions of the universe. All things change, and are changing, from the smallest cell to the most highly organized creature, the noblest mountain range, and the vastest sun in the heavens. To-day differs from yesterday as to-morrow must differ from to-day. All things are becoming.

Test this statement with the observed facts of life. Here is a garden, well-planted and watered. The soil is loamy and black. On all its surface there is nothing, save a clod here and there, to relieve the warm, moist regularity. Come to-morrow and the level surface is broken by tiny green shoots which have appeared at intervals, thrusting through the top crust. Next week the black earth is striped with rows of green. Onions, beets, lettuce, and peas are coming up. Go back to the hills which you climbed in boyhood, ascend their chasmed sides and note how even they have changed. Each year some part of them has disappeared into the rapid torrent. Had you been there in April, you might have seen particles of your beloved hills in every water-course, hurrying toward the lowlands and the sea. While you watch them, the clouds change in the sky, the sunset wanes, and the forest covers the bared hills. Nature, fickle mistress of our destinies, spreads a never-ending panorama before our eyes that we may recognize the one great law of her being,--the law of progression.

II Social Change

How well does this principle of change apply to the organization of society! The absolute monarchy of one age yields to the semi-democracy of the next. Yesterday the church itself traded in men's bodies,--holding slaves, and accepting, without question, the proceeds of slavery. To-day machines replace men in a thousand industries. To-morrow slavery is called into question, until in the dim-glowering nineteenth century, men will struggle and die by tens of thousands;--on the one side, those who believe that the man should be the slave; on the other, those who hold that the slavery of the machine is alone necessary and just. Thus is every social institution altered from age to age. Thus is effected that transformation which men have chosen to call progress.

How profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of education,--the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved shoulders. Even while you raise your hands in supplication, the child has passed from your life forever, leaving naught save a man to confront you.

From these mighty scythe strokes which change sweeps across the meadows of time, naught is exempt. The petals fall from the fairest flower; the bluest sky becomes overcast; the greatest feats of history are surpassed; and the social machinery, adequate for the needs of one age, sinks into the insignificance of desuetude in the age which follows. Thus does the inevitable come to pass. Thus does the social institution, wrought through centuries of turmoil and anguish, become useless in the newer civilization which is arising on every hand. The educational system in its inception was well founded, but the changes of time invalidate the original idea. Yesterday the school fulfilled the needs of men. To-day it fails to meet a situation which reshapes itself with each rising and each setting of the sun.

Each epoch must have its institutions. With the work of the past as a background, the present must constantly reshape the institutions which the past has bequeathed to it. These modified institutions, handed on in turn by the present, must again be rebuilt to meet the needs of the future; and so on through each succeeding age.

At times the march of progress is so rapid that even the most advanced grow breathless with attempts to keep abreast of the vanguard. Again, marking time for ages, progressive movements seem wholly dead, and the path to the future is overgrown with tradition, and blocked by oblivion and decay. The rapid advances of the nineteenth century, challenging the quickest to keep pace, forced upon many institutions surroundings wholly foreign to their bent and scope.

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the educational system, which had its rise in an age of individualized industry and governmental non-interference, and now faces a newly inaugurated socialization of industry and an impromptu system of government control.

The new basis of education lies in the changes which the nineteenth century wrought in industry, transforming village life into city dwelling, and substituting for the skilled mechanic, using a tool, the machine, employing the unskilled worker. The men of the eighteenth century made political institutions, and were content with democracy; the men of the nineteenth century, accepting government as it stood, built up a new industry. The society which we in the twentieth century must erect upon the political and industrial triumphs of our forefathers, can never be successful unless it recognizes the fundamental character of the issues which nineteenth century industry and eighteenth century politics have brought into twentieth century life.

Is it too much to ask that the school stand foremost in this recognition of change, when it is in the school that the ideas of the new generation are moulded, tempered, and burnished? May we not expect that in its lessons to the young our educational system shall speak the language of the twentieth century rather than that of the eighteenth?

IV Education in the Early Home

V City Life and the New Basis for Education

The very thought of city life precludes the possibility of home work. The narrow house, the tenement, the great shop or factory, on the one hand, prevent the mechanic from carrying on his trade near his family; and on the other hand, make it impossible for the father whose work lies far from his home to give his boys the "special care and guidance" about which Froebel writes.

The system of industry which was established in England during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and which secured a foothold in both Germany and the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, has revolutionized the basis of our lives. The workshop has been transplanted from the home to the factory; both men and women leave their homes for ten, eleven, or even twelve hours a day to carry on their industrial activities; great centers of population collect about the centers of industry; the farm, the flock of geese, the garden, the forest, and the blacksmith shop disappear; food, clothing, and other necessaries of life--formerly the product of home industry--are produced in great factories; and the city home, stripped of its industrial functions, restricted in scope, robbed of its adults, presents little opportunity for the education of the city child. Standing on the threshold of his meager dwelling, this child of six looks forward to a life which must be based on the instruction provided in a public school system.

The country boy still has his ten-acre lot, where he may run and play. There are flowers and freckles in the spring; kite-flying, fishing, hunting, and trapping in summer and autumn. The general farm is a storehouse of useful information in rudimentary form. From day to day and from year to year the country boy may learn and enjoy.

The city boy is differently situated. His playground is the street, where he plays under the wheels of wagons, automobiles, and trolley cars; or else he plays in a public playground in company with hundreds, or even thousands, of other children. Even then his activities are restricted by city ordinances, monitors, policemen, and other exponents of law and order.

The city home, whether tenement or single house, cannot begin to supply the opportunities for growth and development which were furnished by life in the open. Where else, then, does the responsibility for such growth and development rest than upon the school? On the farm the boy learned his trade, as Froebel suggests, at the hands of his father. The father of the city boy spends his working hours in a mill, or in an office, where boys under fourteen or sixteen are forbidden by law to go. The city home is unavoidably deprived of the chance to provide adequate recreation or adequate vocational training for its children. The burden in both cases shifts to the school.

A hundred years ago practically all industries were carried on in connection with the home. The weaver, the carpenter, the hatter, the cobbler, the miller, lived and worked on the same premises. Then steam was applied to industry; the machine replaced the man; semi-skilled and unskilled labor replaced skilled labor; great numbers of men and women, and even of children, crowded together in factories to spin thread, make bolts and washers, weave ribbon, bake bread, manufacture machinery, or do some one of the many hundreds of things now done in factories. The change from home industry to factory industry is well named the Industrial Revolution. It completely overturned the established and accepted means of making a living.

The industrial upheaval has changed every phase of modern life. Industry itself has replaced apprenticeship by a degree of specialization undreamed of in primitive life. From the superintendent to the office boy, from the boss roller to the yard laborer, from the chief clerk to the stenographer, the work of men and women is monotonous and specialized. The city has grown up as a logical product of an industrial system which centers thousands, or even tens of thousands, of workmen in one place of employment. The city home differs fundamentally from the country home as the city differs from the country.

The changes now going on in farming are no less significant than those which the nineteenth century witnessed in manufacturing. Science has been applied to agriculture. Old methods are brought into question. Intensive study and specialization are widespread. The time has passed when a farmer can afford to neglect the agricultural bulletins or papers. To be successful, he must be a trained specialist in his line, and the school and college are called upon to provide the training.

No individual is responsible for these changes. They have come as the logical product of a long series of discoveries and inventions. New methods, built upon the ideas and methods of the past, have created a new civilization.

The civilized world, reorganized and reconstituted, rebuilt in all of its economic phases, demands a new teaching which shall relate men and women to the changed conditions of life. This is the new basis for education,--this the new foundation upon which must be erected a superstructure of educational opportunity for succeeding generations. It remains for education to recognize the change and to remodel the institutions of education in such a way that they shall meet the new needs of the new life.

FOOTNOTES:

TEACHING BOYS AND GIRLS

I The New School Machinery

The influence which the industrial changes of the past hundred years has had on education is considerable. With the transformation of the home workshop into the factory has come the transition from rural and village life to life in great industrial cities and towns. The introduction of specialized machinery has placed upon education the burden of vocational training. More important still, it has so augmented the size of the educational problem that an intricate system of school machinery has been devised to keep the whole in order.

The rural, or village, school was a one or two-room affair, housing a handful of pupils. Aside from matters of discipline, the administration of the school was scarcely a problem. General superintendents, associate superintendents, compulsory attendance laws, card index systems, and purchasing departments were unknown. The school was a simple, personal business conducted by the teacher in very much the same way that the corner grocer conducted his store--on faith and memory.

The growth of cities and towns necessitated the introduction of elaborate school machinery. In place of a score of pupils, thousands, tens, and even hundreds of thousands were placed under the same general authority. City life made some form of administrative machinery inevitable.

The increasing size of the school system,--and in new, growing cities the school system increases with a rapidity equal to the rate of growth of the population,--leads to increase in class size. A school of twenty pupils is still common in rural districts. In the elementary grades of American city schools, investigators find fifty, sixty, and in some extreme cases, seventy pupils under the charge of one teacher, while the average number, per teacher, is about forty.

Recrimination is idle. The obvious fact remains that the rate of growth in school population is greater than the rate of growth in the school plant. The schools in many cities have not caught up with their educational problem. The result is a multiplication of administrative problems, not the least of which is the question of class size.

II Rousseau Versus a Class of Forty

A toilsome journey it is from the education of an individual child by an individual teacher to the education of forty children by one teacher . Rousseau pictured an ideal; we face a reality--complex, expanding, at times almost menacing.

The difference between Rousseau's ideal and the modern actuality is more serious than it appears superficially. Rousseau's idea permitted the teacher to treat the child as an individuality, studying the traits and peculiarities of the pupil, building up where weakness appeared, and directing freakish notions and ideas into conventional channels. The modern city school with one teacher and forty pupils places before the teacher a constant temptation, which at times reaches the proportions of an overmastering necessity, to treat the group of children as if each child were like all the rest. A teacher who can individualize forty children, understand the peculiarities of each child, and teach in a way that will enable each of the children to benefit fully by her instruction, is indeed a master, perhaps it would be fairer to say a super-master in pedagogy. A class of forty is almost inevitably taught as a group.

There is another feature about the large school system which is even more disastrous to the welfare of the individual child. Rousseau studied the individual to be educated, and then prescribed the course of study. The city teacher, no matter how intimately she may be acquainted with the needs of her children, has little or no say in deciding upon the subjects which she is to teach her class. Such matters are for the most part determined by a group of officials--principals, superintendents, and boards of education,--all of whom are engaged primarily in administrative work, and some of whom have never taught at all, nor entered a psychological laboratory, nor engaged in any other occupation that would give first-hand, practical, or theoretical knowledge of the problems encountered in determining a course of study.

A course of study must be devised, however, even though some of the responsible parties have no first-hand knowledge of the points at issue. The method by which it is devised is of peculiar importance to this discussion. The administrative officials, having in mind an average child, prepare a course of study which will meet that average child's needs. Theoretically, the plan is admirable. It suffers from one practical defect,--there is no such thing as an average child.

Averages are peculiarly tempting to Americans. They supply the same deeply-felt want in statistics that headlines do in newspapers. They tell the story at a glance. In this peculiar case the story is necessarily false.

An average may be taken only of like things. It is possible to average the figures 3, 4, and 8 by adding them together and dividing by 3. The average is 5. Such a process is mathematically correct, because all of the units comprising the 3, 4, and 8 are exactly alike. One of the premises of mathematics is that all units are alike, hence they may be averaged.

Unlike mathematical units, all children are different. They differ in physical, in mental, and in spiritual qualities. Their hair is different in color and in texture. Their feet and hands vary in size. Some children are apt at mathematics, others at drawing, and still others at both subjects. Some children have a strong sense of moral obligation,--an active conscience,--others have little or no moral stamina. No two children in a family are alike, and no two children in a school-room are alike. After an elaborate computation of hereditary possibilities, biologists announce that the chance of any two human creatures being exactly alike is one in five septillions. In simple English, it is quite remote.

IV The Five Ages of Childhood

A very ingenious statement of the case is made by Dr. Bird T. Baldwin. Children, says Dr. Baldwin, have five ages,--

Two children, born on the same day, have the same age in years. One is bound to grow faster than the other in some physical respect. Therefore the two children have different physical ages, or rates of development. In the same way they have differing mental and moral ages. The school age, a resultant of the first three, is a record of progress in school. Even when children are born on the same day, the chances that they will grow physically, mentally, and morally at exactly the same rate, and will make exactly the same progress in school, are remote indeed. School children are, therefore, inevitably different.

V Age Distribution in One Grade

A very effective illustration of the differences in chronological age, in school age, and in the rate of progress in school is furnished in the 1911 report of the superintendent of schools for Springfield, Mass. There are in this report a series of figures dealing with the ages, and time in school, of fifth-grade pupils in Springfield. The first table shows the number of years in school and the age of all the fifth-grade pupils.

TABLE 1

Theoretically, children in Springfield enter the school at six, and spend one year in each grade. If all of the children in the Springfield schools had lived up to this theory, there would be 1,275 eleven years of age, and 1,275 in the fifth grade. A glance at the table shows that only 131, or about 10 per cent of the children, are both eleven years of age and five years in the school. Among the 1,275 fifth-grade children, 389, or 31 per cent, have been in school five years, and 329, or 26 per cent, are eleven years of age.

The superintendent follows this general table with other tables giving a more detailed analysis of over and under age pupils, and of rate of progress in school.

TABLE 2

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